Siel Wellens is a marine biologist with a BSc in Biology from the University of Leuven (Belgium) and an Erasmus Mundus MSc in Marine Biodiversity and Conservation (Portugal, Lithuania, Brazil). Her MSc thesis was about the trophic competition between mangrove crabs in a subtropical estuary. She is now a PhD student at Ghent University (Belgium) doing research on the responses of harpacticoid copepods to environmental stressors and its implications on the marine foodweb.